Every Hero Was Once a Rebel

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City Boy Chronicles 1

It used to be that summer mornings were staircases of light from our old wooden staircase, and you were careful enough not to make creaking sounds as you sneak down as early as 5am. You were fascinated by the tunnel of light seeping in from the windows, in it were floating fish of dust bones and fluff, and that was one of your strongest memories of lazy weekdays.

You had no cable TV but there was everything interesting on: Sesame Street, or Eminem on MTV, and I still had those VHS tapes and in a few years papa would bring you your first DVD player, along with good movies like Jurassic Park 2 and 3.

You don’t remember breakfasts during summer, and doubt that everyone else does too. It’s a license to skip one meal during lazy days.

Mama always left for work in the morning or had just come home from night duty and it meant two things: you were stuck at home during the day or stuck at home during the day. You had a little boy for a brother who couldn’t talk but your mind was somewhere always far, maybe in the world you’ve always concieved after watching tons of Mr. Bean episodes, dreaming up that the world would always look like the 90’s in United Kingdom. Or so you always thought.

At the turn of the century you had cousins visiting and praying over things like the end of the world and the 6-headed dragon that would soon rise and destroy the world, and it chilled you to the bone but it also reminded you of that dinosaur poster and all the dinosaur toys you’ve loved and lost in the process of building your own Jurassic Park. You couldn’t sleep at night, terrorism was terror, on TV were signs and signs that the world will soon be engulfed in a war that culminated in the destruction of mankind in the hands of a many-headed reptilian beast, yet the idea fascinated you. You played Spyro all afternoon trying to finish it but you were 8 years old and it didn’t make sense at all except for the sounds that will sound very nostalgic five years later, and will bring back all the fear, paranoia and familiarity of that old wooden house in an alley somewhere in the heart of the city.

The world was huge, the sky was always there, and at night you dread looking at red skies but you were in the city and it was staple, because rain horrified you. As you grew older its appeal would lose and you’d remember all the girls you’ve loved because of the rain, or at least made a lame excuse to love water because girls liked to be associated with things of grace. In hindsight, I’ve always been terrified by the premise of being washed away which is quite also a part of the horrors of an impending apocalypse. But still, I was playing dragons on my box TV, enjoyed the little things like my neighbors, or popular toys, and all the while drawing different dinosaur species taken straight from different dinosaur books that clearly weren’t for my age.

You were afraid to flip through your Questions and Answers Encyclopedia and run into the page where it described how the sun will die out. You were that scared. But in the same sense, fascinated.

You couldn’t find a staircase of light that was as interesting as it appeared almost 13 years ago, and things had lost its luster, except if you wake up in the morning and try to feel like you’re seven again.